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Sunday, April 09, 2006

The Process

I often get asked how long it takes to adopt a baby from China. Thefive-second answer is "about a year and a half." Here's what myanswer would be if you had fifteen minutes:

Orientation to submission of dossierMost agencies have an initial orientation where they tell you how theydo the process and more about their organization in general. Youmight have to go to a few different agencies before you find oneyou're comfortable with, but Amy and I lucked out in that we liked thefirst one we attended. From there, there are a set number of requiredmeetings you need to have with the agency in order to satisfy therequirements of the Chinese government. I believe the number is four:the initial orientation, two trainings, and then a home study. We gotthese done in about a month and a half, from mid-July to earlySeptember 2004. From there, it's a lot of paperwork. What sort ofpaperwork? Medical exams, financial records, proof of employment,child abuse and criminal checks, form letters stating our intent tocare for our adopted child, reference letters, and so on. Unfortunately, it's not all in parallel: in other words, it's not likeyou can fill out everything, send it to all the different places, andthen wait for it to get returned to you. Some stuff you have to fillout, send out to be processed, and then wait for it to get returnedbefore you can move on to another thing. If my memory serves meright, the thing that took the longest was getting our fingerprintscleared by INS (it can take anywhere from two to four months; I thinkwe waited a hair shy of three months). That took us to late November2004. We hustled as much as we could from there, getting stuffnotarized (thank goodness for my friend who's a notary), and thencertified (by the state from which the paperwork originated, so ourbirth certificates from the capitals of our home states, andeverything else from Harrisburg, the capital of Pennsylvania), andthen authenticated (by the Chinese consulate closest to where thepaperwork originated, so New York for almost all of our stuff). Finally, in late December 2004 we sent it all to our agency for itsreview, and they included it in their January 2005 shipment ofapplications. It got logged in China on January 20, 2005.

Submission of dossier to notification of referralAt this point, on our side, it's just a long waiting game. They toldus at the outset that they were averaging six to seven months for thisstage; by the time we get to this stage for our second adoption, theaverage will probably be closer to nine to twelve months. In China,of course, Jada was being born, abandoned, discovered, and taken tothe local orphanage. A notice of abandonment goes in the local paper,and the process for matching her with adoptive parents begins. We gotthe call in late July, a little over six months after our dossier wassubmitted and logged in China.

Notification of referral to pick-up of childThe agency told us this part would take six to eight weeks, but itended up taking ten weeks, partly because China was overwhelmed withdemand and had to push some adoption procedures back a month, andpartly because we had to work around national holidays there. Theseten weeks, as you can imagine, were a harder wait than the six monthsbefore, because at this point you know there's a little one waitingfor you, and you've even seen a picture or two of her. During thistime, we ramped up our baby prep (no sense in buying a bunch of babystuff if you don't know if there's a baby on the way, right?) and tookcare of travel arrangements. We left for China in early October 2005.

Pick-up of childYou can see more details on this part by looking at blogs I postedduring this time, but essentially this part takes a little less thantwo weeks. The way we did it, we went to the capital city of theprovince in which the orphanage Jada was in was located, leavingPhiladelphia on Friday the 7th and (having crossed the InternationalDate Line) arriving in Nanchang on Sunday the 9th. We got Jada on aMonday, filled out a bunch of paperwork the next day, and then hungout until Friday, when that paperwork was done being processed. Then,over the weekend we flew to Guangzhou, where the US consulate islocated, and did more processing on the next Monday, Tuesday, andWednesday, including getting her sworn in as a US citizen (an act thatwould become official once Jada arrived on US soil and got her papersstamped). We flew out that Wednesday evening and (because of crossingthe International Date Line) arrived in Los Angeles Wednesday eveningthe 19th and in Philadelphia the next morning (20th).

SummarySo all told, from our first orientation to arriving home with Jada, ittook us about fifteen months. As we look ahead to number two, fromwhat we've been told we're anticipating an additional three months ofwaiting for the referral. So God willing, about a year and a halffrom when we start this up again, we'll be hoping to arrive home withanother baby girl and a little sister for Jada. (PS One otherconstraint is that you can't submit another dossier within a year ofadopting, so since we adopted in October 2005, the earliest we canhave our next dossier logged is November 2006.)